MORE than £1m was spent by Surrey Heath Borough Council on third party consultants in the past year, figures have shown.

The council has published all its spending over £500 as part of a new coalition government transparency initiative.

The initiative the authority has joined, along with others such as Elmbridge and Woking, allows councils to publish spending details on their websites.

However, it only shows how much the council is spending on various services and companies without any details of what exactly the cash is going towards.

The new figures revealed Surrey Heath had spent a total of £1,128,707 in 2009-10 on employing 70 different consultancy firms.

Cllr Moira Gibson, the council's Conservative leader, said they had used consultants to utilise expertise their actual staff did not have.

One area where she said the authority used consultants was to ensure it was getting a good deal when it was due to sign a large contract with an outside company.

“We use their expertise to analyse such big contracts to make sure we get value for money,” she said.

Cllr Gibson added that she supported the initiative to get more local government spending online.

Meanwhile, as the council was publishing the spending details, Surrey Heath officers were trying to use a legal grey area to prevent the details of council contracts worth millions of pounds of taxpayers cash from being made public.

Last month, the Camberley News & Mail used an audit law to inspect the council accounts at Surrey Heath House and made a request to see the details of three contracts the council had tendered out.

Under the Audit Commission Act 1998, all councils in the country are obliged to open up their accounts for their electors to inspect for 20 working days every year.

The Act states that “any persons interested” may have access to “all books, deeds, contracts, bills, vouchers and receipts related thereto” during the inspection window.

The three contracts requested related to DC Leisure, which is contracted by the council to run the Arena Leisure Centre in Camberley, the refuse collection company Verdant Group plc, and contracts surrounding The Atrium shopping centre, also in Camberley.

According to the council’s newly published spending figures, it paid Verdant £3,180,173 last year while DC Leisure received £23,717.

However, Surrey Heath has attempted to use a legal loophole in the Act to bar the release of the contracts.

The council said it was using the legally grey area around what an “interested party” meant under the Act to deny the request on this occasion.

The council’s Freedom of Information officer Geraldine Sharman said that as the News & Mail was not a rate-paying business in the borough, it deemed the newspaper not to be an “interested party”.

In an e-mail response to the request, she said: “The council is keen to be as transparent as possible.

“However, I am unable to waive this lack of entitlement by granting you access, due to the council’s contractual obligations of confidentiality to the various other parties.

“Where the council is obliged by law to disclose information this can override these clauses, but without such a requirement there is a risk of the council being in breach of contract if it allowed disclosure.”